Mary of Nazareth Read online

  He looked at her, and his dark eyes shone with intelligence and cunning in his strange face. “A prophet. He was like me; he didn’t like the Romans, either.”

  “He was small, too, like you,” the one called David said immediately. “And lazy. The scholars say he wrote the shortest part of the whole Book!”

  The other boys chuckled. Obadiah glared at them, reducing them to silence.

  How many times had they fought over the name? Miriam wondered. And how many times had Obadiah had to vanquish them with punches and kicks to impose his will?

  “You know a lot,” she said to David. “And you’re right. The Book only contains about twenty verses of Obadiah. But they’re fine verses. I remember one that goes: The day is near when Yahweh will judge our enemies. The evil they have done will come back upon their heads. And just as you, people of Israel, have drunk on the holy mountain, so all the peoples will drink without respite until their thirst is quenched. And it will be as if there were only one people!”

  She did not mention that Obadiah had fought the Persians, long before the Romans had become the plague of the world. But she was sure that the prophet Obadiah had been just like her young guide: wild, cunning, and brave.

  The children had slowed down and were looking at her in astonishment.

  “Do you know everything the prophets said by heart?” Obadiah asked. “Did you read it in the Book?”

  Miriam could not restrain her laughter. “No! I’m like all of you. I can’t read. But my father read the Book in the Temple, and he often tells me stories from it.”

  Their dirty faces lit up with admiration, making them almost beautiful. What a wonder it must be, that a father should tell his daughter beautiful stories from the Book! They found it hard to imagine. Now they were dying to ask her more questions.

  Miriam protested, serious again. “Let’s not waste time chatting. With every hour that passes, Herod’s mercenaries are making my father suffer. Later, I promise you, I’ll tell you.”

  “And your father, too,” Obadiah replied confidently. “When Barabbas has freed him, he’ll have to tell us.”

  TURNING left and right in a zigzagging movement that did not seem to take them very far, they came to a wider street. The houses here were less dilapidated, and even had gardens. The women working in the gardens looked up, intrigued, as their group passed. Recognizing the children, they immediately went back to work.

  Obadiah turned right again and plunged into an alley hemmed in by thick walls of naked brick: an old Roman building. Here and there, wild pomegranate trees and tamarisks had grown between the cracks, both widening them and concealing them. Some of the trees were so tall that they towered over the walls.

  Miriam noticed that some of the boys had remained behind, at the entrance to the alley. At a sign from Obadiah, they ran forward.

  “They’re going to keep a lookout,” he explained.

  He pulled her unceremoniously toward a big tamarisk bush. The proliferating branches were supple enough to be pushed aside, and they passed through.

  “Hurry up,” Obadiah breathed.

  Her cloak held her back, and she clumsily unfastened it. Obadiah took it from her and pushed her forward.

  On the other side of the tree, to her surprise, she found herself in a field of beans, dotted with a few stunted almond trees. Obadiah leaped through the gap, followed by two of his companions.

  “Run!” he ordered, stuffing the cloak into her hands.

  They hurried along the outside of the field of beans until they came to a half-ruined tower. Going ahead of her, Obadiah climbed a staircase strewn with broken bricks. They entered a square room. Most of the wall at the far end had been knocked down. Through the breach, Miriam could see the back of another building. It, too, was Roman, and very old. It had a slate roof that had partly collapsed.

  Obadiah pointed to a shaky wooden bridge leading from the broken wall to a skylight on the roof of the Roman building. “We have to cross. There’s no danger, the bridge is solid. And there’s a ladder on the other side.”

  Holding her breath, Miriam ventured onto the bridge. It might be solid, but it was also terribly shaky. She slipped through the skylight, let herself down gently onto a wooden floor, and stood up. The room in which she now found herself was like a small loft. Old baskets, used for carrying jars, were heaped up in a corner, eaten away by damp and insects. The floor was covered with plaited straw, broken and crumbling, which crunched beneath her feet. She caught sight of a trapdoor with its flap down just as Obadiah came through the skylight behind her.

  “Go on, go down,” he urged her.

  The room below was dark except for the light filtering in through a narrow door. But there was just enough light to show that the flagstone floor was a long way down. The distance was at least four or five times Miriam’s height.

  With the tips of her toes, she groped for the rungs of the ladder. Obadiah, with a mocking smile on his lips, leaned toward her, and obligingly took hold of her wrist.

  “It’s not so high,” he said, amused. “Sometimes, I don’t even use the ladder. I just jump.”

  Miriam could feel the rungs wobbling beneath her weight. Without a word, and clenching her teeth, she went down. Before she had touched the ground, two powerful hands clasped her waist. She let out a cry as she was lifted and deposited on the ground.

  “I was sure we’d meet again,” Barabbas said, a smile in his voice.

  HE was lit from behind, so dimly that she could barely make out his face.

  Behind her, Obadiah slid down the ladder, as light as a feather. Barabbas tenderly ruffled his hair.

  “I see you’re as brave as ever,” he said to Miriam. “You weren’t afraid of trusting these devils with your life. Not many people in Sepphoris would have dared do that.”

  Obadiah was radiant with pride. “I did what you asked, Barabbas. And she obeyed.”

  “That’s good. Now go and eat.”

  “I can’t. The others are waiting for me on the other side.”

  Barabbas gave him a little slap and pushed him toward the door. “They’ll wait for you. Eat first.”

  The boy muttered a vague protest. Before leaving the room, he unexpectedly gave Miriam a big smile. For the first time, his face really looked like a child’s.

  “I see you’ve already made a friend of him,” Barabbas said, with an amused nod. “Strange-looking boy, isn’t he? He’s nearly fifteen and seems barely ten. It’s quite a struggle getting him to eat. When I found him, he was capable of eating once every two or three days. I think his mother must have coupled with a camel to have him.”

  He stepped into the light from the loft, and she realized that he had changed much more than she had expected.

  It was not just his curly beard, which was now thick. He seemed taller than she remembered. His shoulders were broader, his neck more powerful. Over his torso and thighs, he wore a curious white goatskin tunic, held in at the waist by a leather belt as wide as a hand. A knife hung at his side. The straps of his sandals, good-quality Roman ankle boots, rose halfway up his calves. His head was covered with a long strip of ocher linen, held in place with red and green strips of cloth.

  It was an unexpectedly conspicuous kind of costume for a man in hiding, and he had certainly not acquired it from the artisans of Sepphoris out of his own pocket.

  He guessed what she was thinking, and his face lit up mischievously. “I made myself handsome to welcome you. Don’t go thinking I’m always dressed like this!”

  Miriam assumed he was telling the truth. He seemed more self-confident than she remembered. But there was a gentleness there, too, not entirely concealed by the curiosity and irony with which he looked at her.

  He finished his scrutiny of her and remarked provocatively, “Miriam of Nazareth! It’s fortunate you told Obadiah your name, or I wouldn’t have recognized you,” he lied. “I remembered a little girl, and here you are, a woman. A beautiful woman.”

  She was about to make
some ironic remark in return. But this was not the moment to waste time. Barabbas seemed to be forgetting why she was here.

  “I came because I need your help,” she said, curtly, her voice more anxious than she would have wished.

  Barabbas nodded, also serious now. “I know. Obadiah told me about your father. It’s bad news.” Before Miriam could say any more, he raised his hand. “Wait. Let’s not discuss it here. We’re not yet in my house.”

  They walked toward a courtyard paved with big broken flagstones. Through the cracks, Miriam glimpsed a mysterious labyrinth of narrow corridors, cisterns, fireplaces, and brick and earthenware pipes. The walls were blackened with soot and flaking in places, as if the bricks and the whitewash were only a fragile skin.

  “Follow me,” Barabbas said, leading her between the shattered flagstones and the gaping holes.

  They came to a porch that was quite dilapidated, although the door looked as solid as if it were new. It opened without his even pushing it. Miriam followed him through it. And stopped dead in amazement.

  She had never seen anything like this. The room was huge, with a long pool in the center. The roof was supported by elegant columns, but only around perimeter; in the middle, it was open to the sky. The walls were covered from top to bottom with huge painted figures, strange animals, landscapes full of flowers. The floor was composed of greenish marble slabs arranged in a geometrical pattern.

  But this was only the memory of a bygone splendor. The water in the pool was so green that it barely reflected the clouds. Seaweed waved in its shadow, and water spiders scurried across its surface. The marble floor was half cracked, the paintings had flaked in places to reveal the white beneath, and the bottom part of the walls was stained with patches of damp. Some of the roof had been destroyed, perhaps by fire, but so long ago that the rains had washed away what remained of the charred structure. In the part of the room that was still sound, piles of sacks and baskets filled with grain, leather, and goatskins lay between the columns in heaps so high they almost reached the roof.

  In the midst of this chaos, some fifty men and women stood or lay on woolen blankets and bundles, staring at her unwelcomingly.

  “Come in,” Barabbas said. “You’re in no danger. We all have what we need here.”

  Turning to his companions, he announced with a curious pride, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “This is Miriam of Nazareth. A brave girl who hid me one night when Herod’s mercenaries were hot on my heels.”

  These words sufficed. They stopped staring at her. Impressed by this place, in spite of the disorder and the dirt, Miriam still hesitated to advance. The strange half-naked men and women on the murals, who seemed almost alive, made her uncomfortable. Sometimes only part of the body was visible—a face, a chest, limbs, the folds of a transparent dress—which seemed to make them all the more real and fascinating.

  “This is the first time you’ve seen a Roman house, isn’t it?” Barabbas said, amused.

  Miriam nodded. “The rabbis say it’s against our Law to live in a house where men and women are painted….”

  “Animals, too!” he said sardonically. “Goats! Even flowers! I long ago stopped listening to the rabbis’ hypocritical ravings, Miriam of Nazareth. And this place suits me perfectly.”

  He indicated the surroundings with a sweeping theatrical gesture that made his goatskin tunic bob up and down comically.

  “When Herod was twenty, all this was his. Just because he was his father’s son and the young lord of Galilee. This is where he came to bathe. And to get drunk, of course. And to have women—women a lot more real than the ones on the walls. The Romans taught him to imitate them, to be a friendly, accommodating Jew, the way they like them. He learned his lessons so well, licked their backsides to such an extent, that they crowned him king of Israel and set him up over the rabbis of the Sanhedrin. Now Sepphoris and Galilee are much too poor for him. Only good for bleeding dry with taxes.”

  Barabbas’s companions were listening and nodding their approval; even though they must know this story by heart, they clearly never wearied of it.

  Barabbas pointed to the strange courtyard they had just crossed. “What you saw down below are the fires they used for heating the water in the pool in winter. Years ago, the slaves who were guarding it set fire to the whole system and escaped while the neighbors were putting out the fire. After that, the place was abandoned. Nobody dared enter. It was still Herod’s pool, wasn’t it? That’s how things went on until I made it my home. And the best hiding place in Sepphoris!”

  The remark was greeted with laughter. Barrabas nodded, proud of his guile.

  “Herod and the Romans search for us everywhere. Do you think they’d ever think of looking for us here? Of course not! They’re much too stupid.”

  Miriam was sure he was right. But she wasn’t here to applaud him, although Barabbas did not seem to care about that.

  “I know you’re clever,” she said coldly. “That’s why I came to see you, even though everyone in Nazareth thinks you’re no better than a common bandit.”

  The laughter died down. Barabbas smoothed his beard and shook his head, as if attempting to restrain his temper. “The people of Nazareth are cowards,” he muttered. “All except your father, from what I hear.”

  “That’s why my father is in Herod’s prison, Barabbas. We’re wasting time with this idle chatter.”

  She was afraid the harshness of her tone would make him angry. His companions lowered their eyes. Behind the group of women, Obadiah had gotten to his feet, a stuffed loaf in his hand, a frown on his face.

  Barabbas hesitated. He looked them all up and down. Then he said, with surprising calm, “If your father has your character, then I’m starting to understand what happened!”

  He pointed to one of the recesses in the painted walls surrounding the pool. It had been furnished as a kind of bedchamber. There was a straw mat covered with sheepskins, two chests, and a lamp. A silver pitcher and goblets stood on a large brass table framed by two wooden stools with bronze embellishments. Other furniture and luxury objects, doubtless stolen from rich merchants, had been placed around the recess.

  In spite of her impatience and nervousness, Miriam noticed Barabbas’s pride as he filled a glass with fermented milk mixed with honey and handed it to her.

  “Now tell me everything,” he said, making himself comfortable.

  MIRIAM spoke for a long time. She wanted Barabbas to understand how it had come about that her father, the gentlest and kindest of men, had killed a soldier and wounded a tax collector.

  When she had finished, Barabbas whistled through his teeth. “There’s no doubt they’re going to crucify your father. Killing a soldier and sticking a spear in a tax collector’s stomach…They won’t go easy on him.” He ran his fingers through his beard, in a mechanical gesture that made him seem older than he was. “And, of course, you want me to attack the fortress of Tarichea.”

  “My father mustn’t die on the cross. We have to stop them.”

  “Easier said than done, my girl. You’re more likely to die with him than save him.” His words were ironic, but his face betrayed his discomfort.

  “So be it, then,” Miriam replied. “Let them kill me with him. At least I won’t have bowed my head to injustice.”

  She had never before spoken so vehemently or so categorically. But she realized that she was telling the truth. If she had to risk death to defend her father, she would not hesitate.

  Barabbas realized that, which made his own discomfort all the more intense.

  “Courage isn’t enough,” he said. “The fortress isn’t a field of beans you can just walk in and out of! You’re fooling yourself. You can’t get him out of there.”

  Miriam stiffened, and she pursed her lips.

  Barabbas shook his head. “No one can do it,” he insisted, striking his chest. “Not even me.”

  He hammered out these last words and looked her up and down with all the pride of a young re
bel. She sustained his gaze, icy-faced.

  Barabbas was the first to turn away his eyes. He snorted, got up nervously from his stool, and walked to the edge of the pool. Some of his companions must have heard what Miriam had said, and everyone was looking at him. He turned, his face hard, his fists clenched, his whole body taut with the strength that had made him a feared leader.

  “What you ask is impossible!” he cried fiercely. “What do you think? That you can fight Herod’s mercenaries the way you sew a dress? Or that attacking his fortresses is as simple as robbing a caravan of Arab merchants? You can’t be serious, Miriam of Nazareth. You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

  A shiver of dread went through Miriam. Never for a moment had she imagined that Barabbas might refuse to help her. Never for a moment had she thought that the people of Nazareth might be right.

  Was Barabbas nothing but a thief, then? Had he forgotten the fine-sounding words he had used to justify his activities? Her disappointment was replaced by contempt. Barabbas the rebel was no more. He had acquired a taste for luxury, he had become corrupted by the things he stole and had become like their original owners: a hypocrite, more interested in gold and silver than in justice. His courage amounted to nothing but easy victories.

  She rose from her stool. She wasn’t going to humiliate herself before Barabbas, she wasn’t going to beg. She assumed a haughty smile and was about to thank him for his hospitality.

  He leaped forward, his hand raised. “Stop! I know what you’re thinking. I can see it in your eyes. You think I’ve forgotten what I owe you, that I’m only a robber of caravans. All nonsense! You’re not thinking with your head, only with your heart!”

  His voice throbbed with anger, and his fists were clenched. Some of his companions came closer, drawn by his raised voice.

  “Barabbas hasn’t changed,” he went on. “I steal to live and to support those who follow me. Like those boys you saw earlier.” He pointed at those who had approached. “Do you know who they are? Am ha’aretz. People who’ve lost everything because of Herod and those misers in the Sanhedrin. They no longer expect anything of anyone. Especially not from the subservient Jews of Galilee! Nor from the rabbis, who do nothing but mumble meaningless words and bore us rigid with their lessons. ‘May those who come from the mud return to the mud!’—that’s what they think. If we didn’t steal from the rich, we’d die of starvation, that’s the truth. And the people of Nazareth certainly wouldn’t care.”